Blog Archive
Work-Life Balance
As I sit in my office late in the evening on a weekday, I contemplate the importance of balancing the importance of my research and my desire to see my family.
What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves
Interesting to see the P-value crisis has made it to the New Yorker. It is indeed time to rethink the way we employ the iconic measure of the "success" of an experiment. I have literally had postdocs in the lab come to my office and tell me that a given experiment "failed" because the P-value was 0.051. That is not the appropriate way to approach science. In another case, a postdoc came to me with the results of a multivariate model. The overall model statistics were relatively weak, so he considered the experiment to be non-informative. However, an inspection of the loadings plot showed that all of the identified metabolites came from the same enzymatic pathway. This article reports that "In medicine, a study of forty-nine of the most cited medical publications from 1990 to 2003 found that the conclusions of sixteen per cent were contradicted by subsequent studies." So how do we deal with this brave new world in which P-values no longer light the way? We move forward with common sense, biochemical knowledge, replication, validation and most importantly, the courage to question our findings.
The “Money Culture” in Academic Biomedical Research
The focus on financial gain and return on investment has completley permeated the academic scientific paradigm. Many large grants require a section on IP and a business plan for commercialization of the project. The concept of basic science for the sake of science is being driven out of academics. We are loosing the nature of serendipty that is so important to the progression of science. Academic researchers have less and less time to actually perform research and instead move from grant-to-grant. As we loose the culture of academic research, we are loosing our next scientific breakthrough, our next paradigm shift, our next cure for cancer. In order for science to flourish, scientists need the freedom to pursue their research and to have time to think about their work.
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